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CES 2013 – the best health and fitness gadgets on show

It's not just tech for sofa surfers at CES 2013 – there are plenty of gadgets to keep you in tip-top shape too

09 January 2013/17:24GMT

Alongside the cacophony of gadgets tempting us back to our sofas CES is overflowing (like our post-Christmas gut over our trouser waistband) with health and fitness tech for tracking your activity, measuring your heart rate or even curbing your boundless gluttony. We've put together are five of the best.

Hoping to make an impression on the "telehealth" sector, HealthSpot's booth is a connected booth for patients to see their GP remotely. Inside are all manner of tools from cameras to thermometers that the doctor can ask the patient to apply and get the results beamed back. Will doctors working from home wear their pyjamas too?

If you're the kind of dinner guest who finishes their third helping before anyone else is even half way through their first, the HAPIfork could be for you. We're presuming it's not so-named because it's a fork that makes you happy, but because it uses haptic feedback (it vibrates) to let you know that you're being a mannerless pig. Hopefully you'll soon start savouring your food, eating more slowly and giving your body time to realise that you're full before you get to the bottom of the trough. It also hooks up with your smartphone via an app so you can chart your waning fodder habit. It's not in production yet, but if you stump up some cash on its Kickstarter page in March you could get your own.

In the now great tradition of wrist-borne fitness trackers, the Flex is Fitbit's answer to Nike's Fuelband. Unlike the Fuelband, it has just five LEDs to display goals achieved (no other display) and its brains can be popped into different size wristbands. It syncs automatically with iOS and Android devices too, while a USB dongle for PC and Mac is also included. It's not just your activity that is examined – the Flex monitors the quality of your sleep as well.

Also competing for the wrist-riding fitness crown is this band with three-axis accelerometer, heart-rate monitor and galvanic skin response sensors. It covers many of the same bases as the Fitbit Flex, but you're tied into a subscription to really make the most of all that activity and sleep data flowing from your arm's end.

The award for "Most sci-fi health tech" goes to this little gadget that

measures vital signs including heart rate, temperature, blood oxygenation and electrical heart activity using a device that can be held easily between finger and thumb. Just holding it up to your temple is enough to get a reading and send it via Bluetooth to your smartphone. It's due out at the end of 2013, along with disposable ScanaFlo and ScanaFlu kits which will let perform urine and saliva tests to check for infections.

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